Romulus Global

Networked Gaming

We offer network and security consulting, design and implementation services to casino gaming enterprises building networks to support networked gaming initiatives.  Our staff have been involved in building network gaming systems since 2002!  We designed and built one of the gaming vendor's multi-site progressive systems, then were engaged again a few years later to expand it to support additional requirements migrate from Frame Relay to MPLS VPN WAN services.  We wrote one gaming vendor's network design and implementation recommendations.  We designed and implemented a gaming vendors internal corporate LAN, built their Extranet for customer and partner connectivity and built their redundant multi-homed Internet border.  In short, Romulus Global understands the gaming market and the unique regulatory requirements in the gaming environment.  Our sole focus is offering networking and security services to customers with highly regulated environments, like gaming, credit card processing and consumer credit reporting customers.  We are well versed in the topic of Networked Gaming and have been involved in various incarnations and evolutions of the technology, from "downloadables" to "server-based gaming" to "networked gaming". 

In addition to our work for gaming customers, we have also built some other very large networks subject to similar high compliance and regulatory requirements for the financial, consumer credit and credit card processing markets.

Romulus Global is available for consulting engagements to help you design a converged network to meet ALL of your networking needs on the casino floor, including TITO, IP telephony, networked gaming and slot accounting systems. 

Are you building a casino floor network?  Do you need to design a network for G2S networked gaming systems?  We can help!

Contact Romulus Global today!  

Sales:  702-448-6682

sales@romulusglobal.com

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Network Management Services

Slot Managers and casino IT executives have some critical analysis of the requirements to implement successful Networked Gaming projects and processes in their organizations.   Networked Gaming environments are Mission Critical to a gaming operator!  Casino floor networks are revenue-producing mission-critical networks for the casino gaming enterprise and must be designed and operated as such.  Casino floor networks are subject to compliance and regulatory requirements which must be met in order to maintain compliance.  A variety of network management aspects must be fully thought out and provided to maintain compliance.

Is your staff up to the task?  Do you have highly skilled Network Engineers on staff?  Are you prepared to spend $150,000 to $1M dollars on servers and various enterprise-grade network management tools (none of which are integrated to each other) to perform the necessary network management functions?  Are you prepared to train your staff to the level required for them to troubleshoot and resolve all network issues?   Are you prepared to staff 2-5 or more Network Engineers with salaries from $60k - $150k/yr?

Romulus Global offers Network Monitoring and Management services to gaming customers tailored to the requirements of running a mission-critical revenue-generating network. 

We offer network management services to customers including:

• network device monitoring - SNMP polling and traps - CPU, memory, availability, interface utilization, alarms and traps, response time etc
• perfomance and accounting management  - Netflow - Flow-based monitoring of the applications running on the network to help with quickly troubleshooting and resolving netwok issues, performing ongoing capacity planning and to quickly traceback security issues
• managed logging services - Syslog - redundant centralized logging, easily searchable and available for the log retention period required by compliance rules and regulatory agencies
• configuration management and change management - NCCM - network device configuration backup, configuration security auditing and configuration change detection 
• hosted GPS-referenced NTP time servers - accurate time is a critical feature of a secure network.  Redundant GPS time servers are fairly costly, but their use is required by compliance rules.  2 GPS-referenced NTP servers to provide time for the network can run from $10-$20k + annual maintenance.  We offer a low-cost solution to provide this service for a low monthly cost per device.
• Hosted AAA for network adminstrative access - network security best practices require implementation of TACACS+ Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA) for administrative access.  Other AAA protocols, including RADIUS and LDAP cannot provide the level of granularity for command access for different levels of network personnel that TACACS+ can provide, nor can they provide the same level of command accounting that TACACS+ provides to answer critical questions of "who did what, when" when it comes time to troubleshoot the network or investigate security incidents.  TACACS+ can be expensive and complex for configure and administer.  We offer Hosted TACACS+ AAA solutions with the capability to integrate into a casino enterprise's Active Directory system.
• Firewall adminstration -  firewall administration and troubleshooting can be complicated.  Our staff has several years experience administering Cisco PIX/ASA/FWSM, Checkpoint, Juniper Netscreen, SecureComputing Sidewinder and Cyberguard TSP firewalls, to name a few, in environments where 4, 6, up to 50 or more HA pairs maybe be deployed.  Troubleshooting application connectivity issues can be challenging for staff not dedicated to network security engineering and administration.  Romulus Global can assist by offering firewall administration and troubleshooting services.
• 2nd and 3rd escalation point for troubleshooting - We offer monthly service contracts to provide 2nd and 3rd level support to provide an escalation path for 1st level staff (slot technicians) to escalate network issues for resolution.  It is not cost effective to hire full-blown network engineers to perform simple network administration tasks such as enabling the ports of a switch and placing them in the appropriate Vlan for a new bank of games. It would be far more cost effective to give some basic training to the slot technician staff on these common tasks and arrange a AAA system to provide this minimal level of administrative access (and no more!).  On occasion, network issues arise.  Hardware fails and needs to be replaced under a maintenance contract, software defects (bugs) happen and someone must be able to troubleshoot and resolve them.  Romulus Global is available to be on retainer as a trusted consultant to assist with these infrequent, but complicated network issues that are beyond the scope of the training of the slot support staff.  

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